Have We Learned Nothing? Nine Inch Nails' 'Year Zero' A Decade On

Everything gets written down.

Are you an optimistic person? What does the future look like?

A decade ago, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor pulled us aside and told us how things were going to go down. We would become sedate and pliable, he said. We would allow government control to become our norm. We would stop fighting back. He called this warning ‘Year Zero’.

But did we learn anything?

Set in the year 2022 – or ‘Year Zero’ –  the album was a communique from an America where the populace was rigidly kept in line. It drew from Reznor’s psyche in a unique way that separated it from his lauded previous work. Previously, he had utilised emotions from the deepest, darkest corners of his mind, with thoughts of death and harrowing, hedonistic litanies scattered across the band’s grinding industrial spine. Here he stepped out from his own shadow and found that the view wasn’t one to savour.

Abandoning his previous methods saved him, both personally and artistically. He had fame at his fingertips and could have just cruised along into retirement. Instead, he went to war with everyone. The government and the music industry were on Reznor’s agenda and his views proved scarily prophetic. ‘Year Zero’ isn’t like ‘OK Computer’, because we know you’re only pretending to understand that, it’s a systematic crystal-balling of two of the most corrupt industries on Earth.

Nod your head just in case they could be watching.

‘Year Zero’ is set in a world where Parepin, a government-developed drug, has been leaked into the water supply. It’s sold as protection for the populace following terror attacks (hint: it keeps them sedated) but is another cog in America’s new, Christian fundamentalist power structure. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Even if we haven’t quite reached a Parepin, 1984-level of mind-control-through-hydration just yet, ‘Year Zero’ is here. Flint, Michigan’s water crisis is a reminder that governments are happy to leave an entire city drinking poisonous shit for X amount of time. “Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax,” said a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality shortly before President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in 2016. We’re still looking another three years into the future before the lead pipes are replaced.

Listen to the shit they pump into your head.

Oil pipelines are thrust through American soil with little regard for the future as dollar signs and international deals take precedence. Because it’s always been about money. We’ve been duped into believing it’s not, but President Donald Trump’s Technicolor face screaming BIGLY at us makes it impossible to ignore. His support for the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens the water supply and heritage of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, was followed by word that he initially had a personal stake in proceedings.

He seems happy to sign away Native American land with little more than a meaty, sweaty-palmed thumbs-up from Mar-a-Lago. He just dropped a big bomb, too. Some things never change. Reznor knew that and has the 105th Airborne Crusaders launching attacks in Iran, Yemen, Chad, Turkey, Syria and the Kashmir region throughout the ‘Year Zero’ narrative.

The ‘Year Zero’ government doesn’t give a fuck about the environment, either, letting summertime temperatures creep into the States around February. And the US is now in a position where climate change isn’t considered a fact by senior officials, rather an elaborate hoax implemented to fool the President in the same way that Santa, the Easter Bunny and Jesus are used to swindle children. But what was Reznor trying to prove? He couldn’t actually see into the future, right? When he wrote that banging hook to Survivalism, he couldn’t have possibly seen this. Could he?

So maybe he was just trying to imagine the worst possible scenario. After all, he did call the 2004 Presidential race “one step closer to the end of the world”. In 2017, we’ve taken a few more steps and a lunge or seven. Maybe he was being hyperbolic. Maybe, what we – and he – might have viewed as a far-flung fantasy, this clever little sci-fi narrative that drew comparisons to reality, was actually a handbook for annihilation. Our data is being stolen, our liberties are being crumpled and a Nine Inch Nails album told us it was going to happen 10 years ago.

Turn it up.

None of this would mean anything if the music wasn’t up to snuff. This record could’ve been a head-up-the-arse affair. It could’ve fallen flat, a victim of its own grandiosity. But it didn’t. The music on ‘Year Zero’ is just as expansive as its concept. It’s 63 minutes of fizzing electronics, crisp beats and Reznor’s croon battling against that bone-rattling yell.

There’s quiet and loud, there’s light and shade. It built on the ‘With Teeth’ template and subsequently perfected it, turning down the buzzsaw guitars in favour of calculated, computerised heaviness. Reznor couldn’t possibly have improved on Nine Inch Nails’ pre-‘With Teeth’ output - including cast-iron classics like ‘The Downward Spiral’ and ‘The Fragile’ - so he did something different. Something bigger. ‘Year Zero’ might not be the best Nine Inch Nails record, but it’s certainly the most ambitious and, when you think about it, the most fully-realised. It allowed Reznor even more scope and seamlessly bridged the gap to 2008’s epic ambient release ‘Ghosts I–IV’.

As much as its content was revolutionary, though, the manner in which ‘Year Zero’ was delivered also changed the game completely. Reznor rolled out the album by encrypting clues on the backprint of tour shirts and leaving unreleased music on USB sticks in restrooms for fans to find. Seeing as the harsh, digitised sound of the record was largely conceived on Reznor’s laptop during the ‘With Teeth’ touring cycle, the sizeable recording budget afforded the world of ‘Year Zero’ a life of its own – quite literally.

Alternate reality game specialists 42 Entertainment were drafted and made the experience more than just a few clues in shitty gig toilets. Hell, they made it more than an event. They made it into a world. Working closely with Reznor, 42 activated a swathe of web pages for fans to piece together the puzzle. What was ‘Year Zero’?

Running for several months, the campaign culminated in a small group of fans being given burner phones and taken to a secret gig, which was subsequently ‘raided’ by SWAT police. The entire concept’s scope was monumental and can’t be done justice here, but the point is: we had never seen anything like it. Reznor realised that, in the digital age, people wanted more. People wanted to be taken to that world the musician was singing about, and he did that with ‘Year Zero’. The closest any band’s come to it since is Creeper and their recent ‘Eternity, In Your Arms’ promotional cycle. And even that pales in comparison.

Reznor made it apparent that bands needed to up their game. Albums are now the ‘extra’ to the live show, as opposed to the traditional industry model that existed before illegal downloading and all that horrible business. ‘Year Zero’ preceded Reznor’s split from the majors after years with mega label Interscope and opened the door for things like the recent surprise launch of the ‘Not the Actual Events’ EP on Reznor’s own Null Corporation imprint. That release shipped out with a ‘Physical Component’ that left a bizarre residue on fans’ fingers. It’s not normal, but that’s Nine Inch Nails for you.

Reznor did end up going back to the majors with Nine Inch Nails’ comeback album, ‘Hesitation Marks’, in 2013, but with ‘Year Zero’ he threw himself into the cogs of the machine and survived. The intricacies of that record are here forever for bands to mull over, deconstruct and learn from. It was the ultimate marketing campaign because it was more than a marketing campaign. It was the world we live in encapsulated in a disc, a hyperlink or a glass of Parepin-laced water.

He predicted the death of the music industry and the last throes of freedom. The Presence, an ominous, four-fingered hand descending from the sky, warns the citizens of ‘Year Zero’ to repair the damage they’ve done or face the consequences. They’re all on drugs and have no idea if the Presence is a figment of their imagination, so carry on destroying the planet they call home. We don’t have a massive hand telling us what to do. Why should we stop?

Why should we stop when kids are shooting other kids at school?

Why should we stop when we can just devour propaganda from both sides and question absolutely nothing?

Why should we stop when we’ve been warned by officials in North Korea that thermonuclear war may break out at any moment?

We’ve learned nothing. Literally nothing.

Fuck.

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